Blog

Social Media can be a recipe for disaster if approached carelessly. The speed of the Internet allows us to broadcast our emotions to a vast public, without any structural barrier between our feelings of the moment and the social consequences of making them public. When the private sphere leaks out into the public arena, things…

Article by Dr. Eric Cole Online activity is second nature to today’s kids, but most of us with children didn’t grow up with the Internet. So it may be difficult to know how to advise them and monitor their safety online, especially when a lot of their school work and social life is centered on…

Allow me to go against an important prejudice; there is more to Street Art than graffiti. The first reason is technical in nature; installations, stencils, stickers, all these techniques are used in street art, whose definition cannot be reduced to “improvised drawing with spray paint”. The second reason is conceptual; Street Art is a direct relative…

Next time you read a book or watch a movie, try this simple test. Answer three questions about women in the story. Are there two or more women with a name in the story? Do they speak one with the other? About something different than a man If the answer is Yes to all three questions, the…

It is in the nature of storytelling to inevitably express a point of view, since we simply cannot detach from our own self. There is however a basic difference between an honest narrative (and fiction always falls into this category) and a flat-out lie. Expressing an opinion is one thing, even if we are doing…

Storytelling did not start with books. It started with cave paintings, whispers around a fire and probably dancing far into the night to the sound of drums or just about any hollow instrument that could produce a noise. As humanity, we have told stories to represent, recall and shape reality from the very first moments…

To Kill a Mockingbird and The Name of the Rose are apparently two very different novels. Nonetheless, they share a layered structure, managed through the first-person observation of a very young onlooker who incidentally becomes the protagonist of a coming-of-age novel. Scout and Adso are witnesses of the talent, moral integrity and yet ultimately also of the defeat…

The name of Alexandre Dumas is universally associated with his most famous works, like The Three Musketeers or The Count of Montecristo: less known is his The Wolf Leader, a booklet placing him with the first authors to draw the figure of the werewolf in modern literature. This short novel, much like Polidori’s The Vampyre, contributed greatly to the creation…

I love literature. I also love genres like fantasy and science fiction, which seem to suffer from the stigma of being considered “paraliterature”, as if no true artistic relevance could be found outside the closed borders of realistic fiction. This prejudice against genre literature, which also includes mystery and crime novels, is pretty much absurd…

Writing (and reading) is something we are taught when we are children, just like we learn how to walk or dance. Being a writer is no different from being a professional dancer: creative (and technical) writing is a skill that must be honed with a lot of reading, passion, and hard work. A book or…